“Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened
pencils if I knew your name and address”.
Read this with your best Tom Hanks impersonation and you’ll remember the
origin from You’ve Got Mail. It’s a quote that races to mind this week as
new faces start to dapple the campus, old faces fill my door, tanned and
smiling after a summer of adventure and our gardens shift gears. This Monday our farm students will put down
the fulltime role of pruning, weeding and picking and take up those pencils. Their days on the farm will be limited and
hours in the books will replace those once spent in the dirt. With that we start to recognize seasons
inside of seasons. Certainly the garden
has many more fruits to produce, apples still to pick and prune and baskets to prepare
and deliver. Yet, some larger force that
governs all those under 20, and many just over, has decided that school will
start…now.

by: Stolen from the internet:)

But reminds me of my design students...and fall semester.

I personally have always had a seasonal job. A landscaper from mid college, my falls
beckoned fevered calculations on how to stretch the winter. Ironically although winter was hard on
accounts it was never long enough.
Regularly in September with the cooler evenings I would start a winter
list of hopes needing attention and time.
Then with winter assignments not quite finished I would get my first
smell of fresh mulch in March and I couldn’t be pulled away from the excitement
of new designs. The transition from the private
workforce now to academia hasn’t changed that one bit. For those with a short attention span it fits
quite well. Like the tides that ebb and
flow so does my ability to focus. Life
just starts to become mundane and regular when all of a sudden you wake up and
today your not a farmer or landscaper you’re a student or teacher. Worse then that you may be both, and it’s
fantastic. I love the randomness of the
seasons. With the added early classes
laced with new books, exciting learning opportunities and fresh faces those
seasons become even more complex. How we get it all done on the farm will become
a challenge.

I got up for my early morning run today and sat on the couch
for a while. Hoping that the sun would
come and the need to head out in the dark wouldn’t be. But, the larger force that governs all those
things also decided it was time for sunrises to change. It was a full moon however with a clear sky
and time along the glassy lake turned out to be an honor. The air was warm this morning, not a pleasure
I’ll get to enjoy for much longer. Yet, in spite of all elements being so perfect like many mornings
past, today you could feel the autumnal shift.
Not fishermen one on the pier, no summer vacationers out for a walk with
coffee or run. It was eerie quite in St.
Joe today…a sure sign of fall. - Garth